Jailbreak

Cydia

The Washington Post is reporting this morning that a California court has approved Sony's restraining order against Geohot.

Less than three weeks ago, the consumer electronics giant Sony proceeded to file the order against jailbreaker extraordinaire George Hotz, aka Geohot. Hotz and his team were in Sony's legal line of sight for allegedly bypassing "effective technological protective measures" in PlayStation 3 firmware version 3.55. Earlier this month, Geohot released a controversial jailbreak which enables PlayStation 3 hackers to run custom packages on the console.

[Hotz] maintains that he never intended the hack to aid game piracy and, in fact, told the G4 network show "Attack of the Show" that he took measures to keep the code from being used in that manner.

Sony has previously encountered some resistance in its pursuit of a temporary restraining order when Judge Susan Illston "expressed reservations over whether or not her jurisdiction extended to the case." The California court, however, ultimately sided with Sony. And the rest is now history.

According to published reports, Sony's temporary restraining order (TRO) requires Geohot to stop putting hacker-related information and instructions on the web about the PS3 hack. Hotz has all but 10 days to comply with the court order and fork over his computers to the PlayStation maker. But as the Post notes, Geohot's hack is "readily available through mirror sites across the Internet." And Sony's restraining order is powerless to change that reality.

So what is Sony trying to accomplish? Without question, Sony is trying to make an example out of Geohot. But will it work? As tech reporter Hayley Tsukayama observed in her Washington Post coverage, Hotz has "become something of a cult hero in the hacking community." Sony persecution will likely serve to only increase Geohot's celebrity status.